Grit Lab Report

Hi Jake,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 2: I have 2 or 3 emerging interests but am unsure how to figure out which one to pursue .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were benevolence, self-direction, and universalism.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.

You said your top three talents were analytic, musical, and social.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get a job .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Sleep 7 hours a day while finishing all my work .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Need coffee less .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Too much work .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: Front load all my work when planning my day. .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Sports and music .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Receptive when receiving critical feedback, and Receptive when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being extracurricular activities .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Success can be either a destination or journey depending on what's a more useful metaphor at that point
"The best way to develop interests is experience"
I am more unlike myself than I am unlike other people
Harmony is aerodynamic
Goals bridge the action intention gap
Flow is when your skills meet the challenge and you relax into it and just enjoy.
"Listen to understand"
Every successful founder has had a great support system.
"… chose him as a mentor because he saw what I could be"

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Zora Mardjoko
Jake is an incredibly passionate person and I am glad to have met him through Grit Lab. He always brings a refreshing perspective to our team discussions, and his light heartedness makes him great to talk to. I am amazed by his ability to manage all of his commitments, but his hardworking attitude combined with his ambition to succeed makes it possible. One thing that stands out to me about Jake is his resourcefulness, and I admire his ability to optimize the limited time he has. I am confident that wherever Jake goes, his positive attitude will continue to impress. During his Discovery Project, I was able to learn more about the DJ side of Jake, and the journey that culminated in his DJing at a party. As someone interested in DJing and music in general, I was impressed by his decision to "cross the Rubicon" and buy a DJ board. The fact that he coordinated a performance in the Philippines for winter break shows his dedication. As I reflect on Jake's Discovery Project, I am left not only impressed, but inspired to embark on my own DJing journey.
Rachel Lee
Jake is genuinely one of the funniest and kindest people that I have ever met! He is incredibly passionate about connecting with others and always exhibits positive energy. I am really appreciative of his commitment to contributing to our fun and natural team dynamic. Jake has a natural charm that draws people to him and it was able to bring me out and open up as well — especially since I am more on the introverted side. I am also grateful for our pair-and-share conversations where we shared about our professional pursuits and value hierarchy and I appreciate that he listened to my thoughts with open ears. I wholeheartedly believe that Jake is a great addition to any team as he is not only super thoughtful and caring but also a great leader during our conversations as well. I really enjoyed hearing about Jake’s discovery project where he pursued his passion for DJing. I thought that it was a really unique choice and resonated well with his personality as well as his knack for bringing people together. I thought that it was valuable that he was able to logically break down his project and he skillfully integrated class concepts into his process, such as crossing the Rubicon as the decision to commit to his project by purchasing the sound system. His concrete visual material such as pictures and videos during the presentation complemented his narrative and also brought his project to life! His presentation was also pleasantly unique in that he included various shortcomings that he encountered during his project, and addressed how he was able to overcome them by asking his project BFF. I also really liked the “Future Steps” element where he discussed where he would take his project next, and I learned that it’s something that I want to incorporate into my next presentation as well.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.